[Newspoetry] (no subject) (S'wine flus and floosy)

[Donald L Emerick]

S'wine Flus and Floosy

In swinish theme, an (ex?)NewsEditor-in-Chief buttresses
(now there is a word that begs me talk about it, pars-imoniously,
which is more parse farce than scarce sacred screed of scripture,
for butts generally have no tresses of their own, nor any pig tails)
my recent animadversions which turned speech toward Pig Latin,
which is more than the grammatology of latinized gluttonous pigs,
but also, and this would be true of every language, a psychology,
and, thus, necessarily, as well, a sociology, a politics, an economy,
and, indeed, the entire gamut of the social sciences (history,
anthropology, ecology, theology, and so on, functional specialisms
permitting (forcing?) divisions of labor to keep labor divided,
or, sans intent, that merely maintain, and further increase, a schism
between patterns and practices of knowing, or saying what we are,
what we as a species may happen to be, if we were anything at all.

They (I think I am charitable in even mentioning them here) say
that pigs are a highly intelligent species, far more so than cows,
ducks, chickens, goats, cats, dogs, mice, snakes or birds,
or about any of the domesticated animals living on our farms,
a fact that was not lost on the writer of Animal Farm, so I recall,
for pigs have villainy and physiology (according to another they,
of a medical community) that highly resembles that of man himself.

Man is like a pig in so many senses that
Judaism chose to forbid man to eat pigs,
because of family resemblance, perhaps,
to root out and end traces of cannibalism.

(Most curiously, Christians eat pigs
as commonly as ham and eggs.
They love to fry their bacon;
they bring home their bacon,
meaning thereby to celebrate
a marriage between markets and pigs
that contradicts and contravenes
everything that my Judaism taught me
about markets, marriages, and pigs,
about there being clean and unclean things,
a difference they can not baptismally wash away
because its very nature inheres in all critical distinctions:
that if some things are to be inherently clean and pure,
then other things must necessarily be inherently otherwise:
God essentially opposes Pigs dialectically, and eternally,
procedurally and substantively, as Blix might say,
for while there is heaven, no swine shall enter there.)

Like man, a pig is allegedly most unclean,
preferring to tame his own ways of living
very little, perhaps not at all, for others.

Civilization has always required pigs to fly,
and, yet, there are no Orville or Wilbur pigs
who would teach them to fly mechanically,
as no piglet learns to suckle aeromechanics.

I'd ask if this were a Chinese Year of a Pig,
because I do not know which animal rules,
but perhaps that explains swine flu outbreaks
recently in Washington: pigs rout for truffles
buried in the sands of a distant national land.

Locally, GroundHog's Day is nearly upon us,
although Julio-Gregorian schedule adjustment
might suggest that the true date is a fortnight off.
On Madison's northside, in SunPrairie town,
where artisan Georgia O'Keefe once reared,
they still use a cute ChinaHog, not a GroundHog
like Puxatawney Phil in Murray-McDowell movie.

I was going to talk, in this note, when I started,
about the infinite subject of infinite madness,
which, unlike numeric infinity, has no order to it,
as many people think of order and of madness:
madness would be some kind of lack of order -- 
from the cognitivist view, a lack of self-direction,
a refusal or an unwillingness to be predictable.

I claim to have known some persons, to an extent,
who were said to be mad by some who were said
to be able to make that determination for others.
I am quite sure, by standards that they deployed,
that every person who was in any way prominent
would also have eminently (pre-eminently) qualify:
for almost every person who ever stands out to me,
and almost every person could be made to stand out,
does so by exaggerated (excessive-obsessive) attachment.

At the same time, I also believe every psychic economy
must be fully balanced, somewhere else in living libido,
if I am to believe anything about psychic conservation laws,
which say, in part, that no matter how topology twists,
it neither creates nor destroys what lies on the surface.

In the twisted mind of a madman, orthodox distance fails.
what was far apart becomes what is near, and vice versa.
What seem to be so strange attractors are not so strange
once a twisted topology is completely taken into account.
This distance disorder is how we usually misunderstand
the lack of direction, as a lack of ordinary motivations,
of inclinations in their acting self-showing as dispositions.

Madman and genius, they say (need I say more of them?),
are thus the premier exemplar cases for all of insanity,
though they often go on to sweep in all of the poets
and all artisans of every kind, as well, just to be sure.

I argue that such a result is the artifice of prominence,
and show that the case could be extended, easily,
to every CEO and manager, to every political leader,
to every public figure, to every figure in public.

The Quakers (they-note) said, "The whole world is mad,
and even when Thee art Thou, Thou art a little strange."
(Well, originally, they said "queer" where I say "strange"
but, they do not understand how we slangulated that term.)

Madness, I long ago privately decided -- before Foucault
-- but he published first, and far more famously than I --
centers on maintaining respect for valued social conventions:
no man fails because he is mad, and
every man fails when he fails to be mad;
madness itself is no sign of any failing.
However, every person also faces unrealistic expectations,
mostly from others, who want you to be other than you are:
they neurotically want the pigs to also be those pigs who fly.

When we wish, like Gods, to punish someone,
we pretextually note that a person is made mad.

Well, as I said, I was going to talk on the madness of pigs,
perhaps even mention the tale of how Jesus cast madness
out of the form of man into the form of the pig, collectively,
out into the herd of swine, who promptly all rushed to die.
Perhaps, pigs could recognize madness for what it was,
that to be fated to live in madness is fate worse than death,
provided that you care about what that they may be saying.

And, if you are beyond the point of such caring,
and I think this is also most possible,
then you may have stopped worrying
about what they say about you,
or what they might do to you,
and you may have become a god,
as mad as gods you must then be.

Thanks, for listening, madly,
my ladies and maladies of gentlemen,
mad flies that madly buzz around me,
Donald L Emerick